Round Rock - Michelle Huneven [5]
Red rolled down his window and blew smoke outside. Though he’d never tell anyone, Frank’s escapes hurt his feelings. To take to heart anything a big, mute, brain-damaged man did sounded crazy. Still, Red had kept him out of institutions for all these years, so if Red was a little busy for a change, it seemed that Frank could endure some inattention. Frank didn’t have to answer to the board of directors. He didn’t have to do paperwork or run into town or apply for grants or listen to the endless river of anger and self-pity that flowed from the mouths of the newly sober. Frank didn’t have to write schedules or mop up after suicide attempts or make sure the citrus groves were picked and cultivated and sprayed and irrigated. If anyone deserved to run away, Red thought he himself should have that privilege.
Red smoked and thought about where he’d run. He’d probably go to the mountains, hole up in a cave or some old hunter’s shack slumping into the ground. He’d avoid people, become a hermit, even a rumor, like Big Foot. Hikers would tell how when they were lost, he materialized and led them back to their trails. They would show off the splint he made for their broken bones, recount how he fed them elderberry juice and watercress salad and smoked squirrel meat. (Red had eaten squirrel, and it wasn’t bad—a little gamy, maybe, but the smoking would help.) The only thing he’d ask for in return would be books—best-sellers, guidebooks, hand-scrawled journals, whatever written matter the hikers carried. He’d accumulate a library, and in the winter he’d read.
In the army, Red had once spent a winter reading books up in Alaska. On one training maneuver, he and another officer built an ice cave, a six-by-eight-foot room dug deep into the snow. They lived there for ten weeks. The ceiling was a tarp, the entrance an L-shaped dogleg dug off to one side. They carved out little sleeping shelves and niches for their food and gear. On their first day, after the warmth from their bodies made the walls sweat, they rolled back the tarp and the walls froze as shiny and hard and refractive as glass. A single candle then threw enough light to read by. Since either Red or his partner was always on watch, privacy was absolute—at least in the beginning. These maneuvers were all part of a staged war, and after a while the enemy developed the bad habit of showing up and asking for a slug of Red’s vodka. But before the enemy became a nuisance, there was that warm, brilliant cave of pure silence, and Red missed this more than any other part of his life—certainly more than his childhood, his marriage, or even the heady first years of the farm.
The truck creaked and bounced a little as Frank climbed inside. “Hey, Franky,” Red said. “Attaboy.” He lit Frank’s cigarette, plus a new one for himself, then reached over and closed Frank’s door. Just as Red put the truck into gear, Ernie Tola came out of the Blue House waving his arm. Ernie was Round Rock’s full-time cook. In his fifties, he looked and often acted like a well-coiffed, temperamental woman with a goatee.
“You might as well bring Frank right back in here,” Ernie called out. “Detox just phoned and they got a live one for you.”
Red turned to Frank. “Damn it all, Franky, did you hear that?” Then he yelled out the window, “Anybody we know?”
If it was a repeat customer, Red thought, he could leave Frank in the truck, because they—the drunk and Frank—would already be acquainted. But a brand-new fellow might not appreciate such a dramatic example of what drinking can do to you if it doesn’t kill you first.
“Naw, just some young drunk who likes his coke,” Ernie hollered. “But Bobby thinks you’ll take to him.”
“Yeah, right.” That Red didn’t much like cokeheads was no secret. In his opinion,